Ronnie picked up her basket and continued on, balancing it on her hip as she pulled the sliding door open. The guesthouse had once been Sam and Sarah’s private domain. They’d play house. Ronnie smiled, remembering Sarah, at five or six, sitting importantly at the dining-room table with a stack of paper in front of her. Bring me a coffee, she’d tell Sam, with an imperious tilt to her chin that would send her mother’s reading glasses sliding down her nose. Then take the kids to the beach. I am VERY BUSY doing my writing. Poor Sam would scurry to obey, filling a mug up with water and saying I’m going to be late to work! while Sarah ignored him, scribbling on the pages with a red pen or pretending to take calls from the dean.
I was a good mother, Ronnie told herself. She’d stopped smiling, the memory giving her an unpleasant twinge. She didn’t like the idea that all that Sarah remembered was a parent too busy or distracted to notice her. Was that why Sarah never brought her boys out here for long? Was it that all she remembered from their summers in Truro was a mother too busy to give her the attention she needed?
Ronnie shook her head. What was done was done. She couldn’t change the past, or what her daughter felt. Head down, she walked back to the house, barely noticing the sound of the waves, or the warmth of the deck beneath her bare feet, as she thought.
If Sarah and Eli weren’t going to be in the guesthouse, they’d have to be in the guest bedroom, on the other side of the hall from Ronnie’s bedroom. It was a smallish room, with a queen-sized bed, and for a minute Ronnie considered giving up her own room, and her larger bed, so that her daughter and her six-foot-tall son-in-law could have more space.
She decided against it. Giving Sarah the master bedroom could serve as a reminder to her twin about what he’d had and lost—or, worse, it would give Sam evidence that Sarah was Ronnie’s favorite （Sam was actually her favorite, but that was a secret she’d be taking to her grave）。 Ronnie liked her space and her privacy and disliked the thought of having to move her clothes, and her makeup and her medications, not to mention the Poise pads she’d started to occasionally require. The bedroom still held the ghost of Lee’s scent; the strongest echoes of presence. If the upstairs couch had been Ronnie’s domain and the guesthouse had been Sam and Sarah’s hideout, this room was Lee’s fiefdom. There was a small office set up in front of the window that faced the pool and the meadow, and there was a round cushioned seat, big enough for two, on the deck that overlooked the bay. Dad’s tuffet, the kids had called it. On summer afternoons, Lee would head out there with a book, and most of the time she’d find him dozing, the book open on his chest and his glasses askew. Sometimes, she’d look out the bedroom window and imagine that she could still see him there, stretched out on the tuffet with the breeze ruffling his hair and a glass of ice water beside him.
This house is full of ghosts, Ronnie thought, and wiped her hands on her legs. Sometimes, she almost thought she could hear the house itself talking to her; telling her that Lee was still there, that he hadn’t left her; telling her that Sarah and Sam were still little, that they hadn’t grown up and left her behind.
Ronnie shook her head at her own folly, telling herself she was turning into a foolish old woman. She forced her brain back to the present, reviewing her decisions. Sarah and Eli in the guest bedroom, Sam and Connor and Miles and Dexter downstairs, however they decided to configure themselves; Ruby and Gabe in the guesthouse, with Gabe’s mother and aunt there, too, unless she could work some magic and find them a hotel room. Best of all, she could tell Suzanne and Matt that there was no room at the inn, and she wouldn’t even be lying. Perfect.
Ronnie showered and dressed and drove into Provincetown. She had an appointment at noon for her annual physical at the clinic on Shank Painter Road. Once that was done, she’d go to the Stop & Shop to start stocking the kitchens, and to talk to the people at Wildflowers. Cherry blossoms, she thought dreamily. Was the end of June too late for cherry blossoms? Maybe they could cover the banister in pink and white blooms, and build centerpieces of blossoming branches.
But Ronnie never made it to the supermarket that day.
“An MRI?” Ronnie asked an hour later, hearing the paper of the examination table crinkle underneath her. “Really?”
“Really,” said Dr. Dominguez. Usually in perpetual motion, hurrying from one patient to the next, the doctor had spent a long time lingering over Ronnie’s belly, pressing here, prodding there, rattling off a series of questions: Any unexplained weight loss? Any fatigue? Nausea? Loss of appetite? Blood in her stool? Now, she kept her gaze on Ronnie’s, making an unnerving amount of eye contact.